“A lushly epic love story that’s both inspiring and heartbreaking…In addition to richly detailed story panels, the gorgeous Arabic ornamental calligraphy makes each page an individual work of art. A dense, swirling dervish of a tale…this will be the most talked about graphic novel of the fall.”

Publishers Weekly

“The stories in Patricia Engel’s striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone’s photo album: glimpses of relatives, friends, lovers and acquaintances, sometimes posing, sometimes caught by the camera unawares. There are portraits of Latinos in suburban ‘Gringolandia,’ and portraits of young drifters in Miami, 16 of them sharing a single apartment, mattresses crammed together on the floor ‘like it was war times.’ There’s a skinny 16-year-old boy who always wears faded jeans and ‘a white button-down shirt that looked like it only got washed in the sink,’ a high school mean girl who develops a fatal case of anorexia, a womanizing pot dealer who becomes the narrator’s best friend and a Colombian beauty queen who comes to America and is forced into prostitution.”

Janet Maslin (The New York Times)

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction

“Just Kids captures a moment when Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown, to the point in which a touristy couple in Washington Square Park spied them in the early autumn of 1967 and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively, ‘They’re just kids.’”

Janet Maslin (The New York Times)

“Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, Freedom, showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.”

Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)